When Sarah and Will look back on their wedding, the first word that comes to mind for both of them is… fun!
With the help of their humanist celebrant, they created a day filled with warmth, surprises and, above all, fun, which they shared with their friends and family.
“There were just under 100 people there – a third were family, and two-thirds were our friends from school, university, work…” explains Sarah. “We’re at the age when everyone we know is getting married – we’ve been to a lot of weddings! We wanted our wedding ceremony to be engaging and interesting to everyone, as well as meaningful to us. Our overall aim for the day was that everyone would have fun.”
A wedding ceremony where everyone got involved
“Our goal was for people to be in the moment with us throughout the whole ceremony” continues Will. So the couple filled the ceremony with personal touches and gave their guests plenty of opportunities to join in as their humanist celebrant, Leilia, led friends and family in making their own vows to support Will and Sarah.
Even the exchanging of rings was designed to involve everyone. Sarah explains, “Our best man popped the rings under one of the seats before the ceremony. We had no idea who would be sitting on that seat, so we didn’t know who was going to be our ring bearer until the celebrant said, ‘Everyone, look under your chairs!’.
“Our friend who found the rings under his chair was pleased – you could see him in the photos going ‘yes!’ He was happy to be more involved than he had anticipated.”
A wedding ceremony full of surprises
Their choice of venue also enabled Will and Sarah to include more fun surprises in their day. “It was a wedding venue with lovely gardens, but also a farm,” says Sarah. “At the end of the ceremony, we had ‘confetti ponies’. Instead of the two of us coming through the arch, where guests were waiting to throw confetti, two ponies walked through! Later in the day, people could get photos with the farm’s piglets too.
“We tried to be as secretive as we could about everything – only telling the people who needed to know. Even our parents didn’t know about the ponies or about the rings!”
But there were no surprises for humanist celebrant, Leilia, who is an old friend of Will’s. She helped Will and Sarah come up with ideas to make the wedding extra-special, knew exactly how it would work on the day, and made sure everything went to plan when the time came.
“We’d been to a few other humanist weddings and knew that by choosing a humanist ceremony ourselves, we could do something completely personalised to us,” says Sarah. “And we’d seen Leilia conduct a humanist wedding before, so had a pretty good insight into how she would tell our story…”
“…About ten minutes after seeing her do that wedding, we asked her to conduct our ceremony!” adds Will.
A wedding ceremony that told our story
“Even though we knew Leilia already, she went through the same steps she would with any couple to make sure we knew everything,” explains Sarah.
“First, she went through the process and the logistics, so we could be comfortable with what was going to happen and that we understood it all. We met again a couple of weeks later for a deep dive into our story – how we met, the milestones in our relationship, the proposal. She asked what marriage meant to us.
“She took everything away and came up with a first draft for us to review and amend as we wanted. She said, ‘You can rip it up if you want, change anything – I want you to be 100% happy with this’.”
Leilia took what Sarah and Will told her, their shared interests and stories, and used these to shape a unique, bespoke ceremony.
“I make puzzles for escape rooms as a side job,” says Will, whom Sarah refers to as ‘an escape room fanatic’. “For the proposal, I made a day-long puzzle trail across London for Sarah, like an escape room without walls, including the places we love and that meant something to us.
“Leilia knows us. She’s even done an escape room with us both before, so she knew this was part of who we were. She spotted something there, so she asked for our escape room rules, the ways we got through as quickly as possible, and used these when she was telling our story in the ceremony.
“There was also an escape room at the wedding that guests could do at any point during the day!”
A wedding ceremony that was meaningful and fun
Alongside all the fun and laughter, there were serious moments in the day.
Will remembers: “We had personalised vows. They were so beautifully put together. Although Sarah and I wrote them individually, our celebrant curated them so that they felt connected in structure, even though we hadn’t seen each other’s.”
“I get nervous about public speaking and I was worried that I’d concentrate on my nerves during the vows and not enjoy the moment,” adds Sarah. “But our celebrant was there, with a look of such support that all my nerves disappeared! I was filled with calm and I could take it all in.
“Having a humanist wedding meant we could choose the person who was going to tell our story,” says Will. “That was massively important for me.”
Sarah agrees: “When you are entrusting someone to share your personal stories, you need to be able to trust them. Our celebrant made us feel so at ease.”
Sarah and Will achieved their aim for the day – everyone had fun!
Thank you to Will and Sarah for sharing their story with us, and to their photographer Nikki Watkins from Nikki Watkins Photo and Film for the wonderful images.
Will and Sarah’s Humanist Ceremonies wedding celebrant Leilia is based in Bristol, and working across the Southwest, you can get in-touch with Leilia here.
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- We had a humanist wedding after 22 years together
- A same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland and a steampunk wedding in England: Rian and Owen’s humanist ceremony
- Lauren & Chris’ castle wedding in Northern Ireland
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